URUK ch1,2 Reading Response

Andrew Brown

004

Liverani’s characterization of Uruk as an agricultural giant, fueled by advancements in agricultural technology, makes unique the pattern of social development he identifies there. The idea that, as the community evolved from a chiefdom into a state and grew in size and in complexity, familial relationships diminished in size seems to contradict much of what I had presumed about early civilization.

Liverani credits the boom in productivity in the Mesopotamian agricultural economy to three inventions: the long field, the seed-plow, and the threshing sledge. It is difficult to pinpoint which came first, the large, complex administrative body or the surpluses of food that ended up supporting masses of corvee labor. Whichever is the case, despite certainly being contingent upon these advancements in labor-saving technology, the long-term stability of Uruk’s economy owes itself to the tri-polar administrative relationship. As Liverani says, the temple enabled the governing body to tax food-producers, thereby providing sustenance for other citizens to enter non-producing occupations.

When all these themes combined, Uruk looked a little something like this: a booming agricultural sector was producing way more food than the society could eat, the presence of the temple made farmers donate their surpluses and labor to the government instead of hoarding them for gains in personal status, and a standardization of house-size that manifested a feeling of equal participation by all in the state.

The only problem I have with all this is how the government coaxed its populous into work without the aide of social stratification. If a doctor held equivalent property to a farmer or a merchant, how was work motivated by the administrative elite? It seems impossible to me that ever-growing public agencies could have been supported by such an egalitarian society. However, perhaps it is possible only in such an egalitarian society for the taxation and redistribution of produce to occur without uprising or overthrow.